This seems fantastic! Is there a reason why Eevee shouldn’t go down this route?
Because eevee isn’t just the realtime renderer but is also a final renderer replacing the old internal renderer so a solution with higher quality output would be needed instead.
It’ll be interesting to see how Godot improves over time.
Also generating distance fields that will play nicely with this lighting system requires building assets in a way that film production assets generally don’t need to be built. Can’t have any non-manifold meshes or cards otherwise you’re going to get light leakage. Any place the mesh is thinner than the voxel size for a given SDF cascade will not be lit properly.
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Well, a preprocessing stage could be implemented where the cards and non manifold meshes are given some thickness(extruded along normals) and then the SDF cascade can be built from that intermediary surface.
But again, wont look nearly good enough and will bring issues of it’s own with respect to transparency masked surfaces. The reflections wouldn’t show them.
First beta for Godot 3.2.3
Because of the regressions found in Godot 3.2.2 (once it started being used heavily), the Godot team is putting together a new point release aimed at fixing them and other bugs. This version will contain bug fixes in areas that didn’t get much attention before, such as the Bullet physics implementations.
They really want to make sure your experience is stable before they move on to backporting more features and optimizations from master.
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Having Godot 4.0 builds that are somewhat usable now is spoiling my interest in making games with the engine, because look at this demo for instance.
The new GI and the resulting reflections are just too good with the way it works for any kind of scene, Indoors, outdoors, and so on. No need to muck about with the limitations of the old system or dealing with how to make it work for a large area. In an empty version of a level from one of my game projects, I even put a light which is an emission mesh (in a darker area) and it just worked.
Just to note, some porting work on the script side will be expected as GDscript is getting an overhaul (with greatly improved performance as one of the eventual consequences). Even now, some of the more advanced techniques have been tweaked to work a lot better now.
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Godot 3.2.3
No, you will not see new features in this release, what this release brings is hundreds of fixes for issues large and small (in order to get the engine to a very good state before the bug/issue hunting begins anew in Godot 4.0).
Meanwhile, the Godot team has recently made an incredibly good move by hiring the GDQuest guy to work on documentation (which will ensure good coverage of Godot 4’s features when the official alpha builds start).
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New SSAO:
And ( could this be usefull for Eevee? ):
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GPU Particle Improvements.
Among the things that can be done now are particle collisions, attraction effects, weather systems ect… In addition, because this is the last of the major features that was in need of being ported over, the next few months will focus primarily on general improvements, cleanup, and optimizations.
Finally, they are hoping to unveil an official alpha build in December or January. There is still a lot of work ahead, but version 4 is now at the point where you can expect an increasing level of usability for those using current builds.
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GDscript has finally gotten faster
To note, Godot 3.x introduced optional typing for GDscript, it brought various benefits, but it didn’t actually make anything faster. Now, people who use a lot of static typing in their scripts will see a noticeable boost in performance. Do note that performance is not as good as it can get now, but further optimization work will be put off in favor of making sure GDnative and GDscript is stable.
Meanwhile, Godot 3.2.4 has gotten its first beta build.
This time, there are a number of enhancements and optimizations all over the engine. Vulkan is obviously not going to come until version 4, but graphics are among the areas with bugfixes and optimizations.
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Godot 3.2.4 beta 2
Godot continues to get sizable quality enhancements while 4.0 remains in a pre-alpha state.
Among the more notable enhancements
- The ability to configure the number of lights allowed per mesh (now at 32 by default, a massive upgrade from the previous max of 8 lights). The light count can now go to the limit of what the GPU can handle.
- Massive upgrade to .fbx support, this one is particularly important for those using commercial software.
- Pixel perfect 2D transformation for the 2D engine, eliminating the long-standing jitter problem with pixel-art games.
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Godot now has a user with a channel doing a series of videos titled “Made in Godot”/
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBvijb867Fpj1hyjxrBfLsg/videos
It is similar to the “Made in Unity” channel that has been going for a while now. Godot’s Reddit site has been seeing a rapid increase in project demos, but this format is far better.
Camille Mohr-Daurat hired to overhaul Godot’s physics
You have read that right, the current Bullet implementation will be removed in favor of a highly enhanced version of the old in-house physics engine (but Bullet will still be accessible as a plugin). On the last part, the work will mean any physics engine can be plugged in if needed (which includes Nvidia PhysX). Among the reasons for the custom engine to stay is for maintainability and for keeping Godot lightweight.
Now before anyone calls out the devs. as crazy, it should be noted that both Unity and Unreal are working toward custom engines as well (DOTS Physics and Chaos). When Godot Physics becomes the default again, it should more or less have everything the Bullet implementation brings now.
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Better than the buildbot? Discover team Godot’s github actions page
What this page does is show the results of a script set up by the Godot devs, which essentially attempts to pop out a new build for all platforms not only for master after every commit, but for every pull request after every revision. By the looks of it this is as close as you can get to the holy grail of build availability.
It was definitely a welcome discovery for me after noting the daily builds on other sites stopped.
How are you actually downloading these builds though? I usually build my own, but if there is a daily automated way to do this I would use these. Can’t find a way of downloading a windows exe though.
Godot 3.2.4 Beta 6
I usually don’t highlight beta builds, but this stands out due to the Godot team’s determination to backport some of Godot 4’s improvements to the stable branch. In this case, the main things are version 4’s lightmapper as well as its Godot Physics BVH code (yes, the original built in physics engine).
The result is that good lighting which uses the environment should be a lot easier, and those using Godot Physics will see some nice performance improvements.
That is not to discount the continued improvement in other areas, there are iOS build improvements, a feature to make it easier to build UI’s to various aspect ratios, and many smaller improvements.
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Godot 4 rendering gets turbocharged
In other words, a lot of optimization work has been done, meaning that anyone who is crazy enough to start a game with Godot 4 now will see far faster rendering (even with GI together with lots of objects). The GI rendering also now has some settings which will lower the quality somewhat, but should cause it to render a lot faster.
Coming up in the weeks ahead is further optimization, a solution that actually works for many dynamic objects, and possibly an Alpha build. Other features meanwhile (like Occlusion culling) will be looked at after the big todo items are done.
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Kefir (a game studio) grants 120,000 dollars for Godot’s development.
Their game products are not made with Godot at the moment, but they are beginning to use the engine and they like what they are seeing. There is currently no information on what the money will be used for, but past large donations have been used to great effect in areas like the push to Godot 4.
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Joan Fons joins the hired Godot devs. as a render engine developer
As people are noticing by now, the Godot crew is slowly assembling a paid core team to get Godot 4 to the finish line. Who they hired this time was the person who created the engine’s new lightmapper (which is also now found in Godot 3.2.x), and the current plan is to give Godot 4 occlusion culling along with just getting the renderer to a production-ready state (though there’s no indication if backporting the culling to 3.2.x will be possible).